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 7/10 Very Good --- blog.wired.com http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/atom.xml
| Wired.com weighs in on the latest science news, including space, biology, disease, drugs and alcohol, geology, math, neuroscience, and physics. ... |
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 --- 73 days ago http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/public-invited.html
| In a delightfully participatory move, scientists from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team have invited the public to search through 18 new hi res images taken from the satellite (a whopping 1.6 billion pixel each) to look for the lost NASA Mars Polar Lander. The images surround the area where the lander likely impacted the Martian surface in 1999 and then fell silent. Finding the wreckage might provide a clue as to why the spacecraft failed. If you had a screen that could show 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, you would need to look at 1,600 screen shots to cover just one of the 18 photos. Sounds like a perfect job for crowd sourcing! Enter a cadre of eager Martian explorers and bam! Within a few days there are already people posting pixel coordinates of interesting finds. The invitation also has a link to a presentation that shows what Viking
1 and 2, Pathfinder (labeled MPF in the presentation) and Spirit and
Opportunity look like from the new HiRISE camera to give searchers a
sense of what to look for (they are also cool just to check out). HiRISE has a resolution of 25-30cm/pixel which means that all of these spacecraft are only a few pixels across (but at least they are visible!). It's kind of like looking for your bike on Google Maps. "Before HiRISE came along, it was a lot like having a state road map to find a neighborhood address," says geologist Tim Parker of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. "Su ... |
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